Google Wave

Posted by Richard Thomas on 20 November 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: google wave, wave, collaboration, open source

You may have heard about Google Wave. It's a new technology being developed by Google. Google describes it as:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more

I was lucky enough to get an invite in the first round of public invites. It was a bit strange at first. As Rod Drury put it, it felt a bit like the first people with fax machines must have felt - no one else to talk to. However, that is rapidly changing. We all were provided with invites to send to friends. They came online and we were all given more invites. Now there must be several million people using it and they are all busy working out how to use Wave and what to use it for.

We have been using it to collaborate with our designer who lives and works several hundred kilometres away. Currently we are working on a website and we are finding the ability to share information through Wave to be very beneficial. We can either work together discussing topics live or separately and read the other's text in our own time. This particularly suits me as I tend to start work around 4:00am which many hours before the designer becomes available.

Wave is an exciting and new development in the online world. Google hope to have it replace e-mail as the preferred contact medium. To further this aim they have made the Wave protocol open and are Open Sourcing the code behind it. They want Wave servers to proliferate to the same extent that e-mail servers have.

Keep an eye on it. It has the potential to be as disruptive as Google Maps is proving to be. Read more about it at the site below. There is also an informative video on the page:

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html